This component will contribute to the implementation of the Strategic Education Plan to allow children and adolescents from indigenous, Afro-descendant and rural communities to access and complete a quality basic education that prepares them for life, taking their sociocultural context into account. To that end, it will support the design and implementation of strategies aimed at ensuring that more children and adolescents in the most remote rural areas and indigenous communities complete sixth and ninth grade. This includes strengthening the national teacher training system with the design and implementation of new education programmes, regulations and didactic materials, and with instructors trained to provide initial and ongoing education for teachers. At the local level, the component will contribute to the accelerated training of multi-grade teachers in the four teacher training schools covering the 24 municipalities with higher poverty rates.

Support will be provided for the development of flexible modalities that are attractive and useful for these excluded populations, technically accompanying the development of culturally-appropriate methodologies that promote and ensure educational inclusion, teacher training, gender equality and community involvement.Given that the indigenous and Afro-descendant population has least access to quality education, special emphasis will be placed on support for the Regional Autonomous Education System to ensure intercultural bilingual education.

The component will also contribute through the national learning evaluation system, accompanying the capacity-building strategies for the implementation of a quality education model that includes topics such as: healthy environments and practices, food security, school water and hygiene, the prevention of violence and HIV, gender practices, risk management and climate change. The fundamental strategy will be to strengthen the national teacher training system’s modalities for inter-training, systematization and the dissemination of good practices.

Advocacy will continue with the Ministry of Education (MINED) for the standardization of school infrastructure norms for water and sanitation, together with a menu of technological options appropriate to the country’s different realities.

The component will help provide adolescents in conditions of exclusion—particularly adolescent girl—with educational arenas, capacities and opportunities with a life skills-based approach, particularly through rural secondary schools.

The programme will contribute to the design and implementation of education policies, programmes and strategies with equity, gender and intercultural approach and a national scope. Simultaneously, accompaniment will be provided for knowledge-generation processes that allow the systematization of pedagogical innovations and demonstrate specific results in the classroom to provide feedback on national policies.